Ivesti and the home of Gypsies

The street…seems not worthy of the houses

Might be for a family of four.

Main hallway, balcony above.

Bed with gold nightstands.

Dateline: Ivesti, Romania; November 1-3, 2013--On 27 October I was invited to speak before all of the pastors and elders from the Moldavian Conference in a large hall in the city of Bacau. Moldavian is not Moldova; there are various zones in Romania, somewhat like our states or counties in the USA. There is Moldavia, Transylvania, Dobrogea and Ardeal and probably a few more. I was told there were over 500 people attending the meetings. When I finished my talk and before I could leave the hall, I was invited to speak in the village of Ivesti the following weekend.

Let me first explain ”village.” Eastern Europe is sown liberally with these gatherings of buildings and homes insulating short stretches of highways in otherwise farm country. There will be no traffic signals, no crosswalks, no street lights; just a corridor of walled yards and occasional stands offering excess produce for sale. ALL yards have either a fence or more commonly a solid wall of either stone or metal. But attached to nearly every wall there is a bench. When I was growing up every house had a porch and people sat on them and greeted neighbors as they passed by or watched the children play. Over here the old folks sit and talk about what old people talk about, mostly the past I am sure as there isn’t much future left for most of them. On summer evenings, everyone is out.

Growing up we had some “burgs” that approximated these quaint throwbacks from a more pastoral time. Chasetown, the last gathering of dwellings before our farm was one of them. Mt. Orb another. But today, whereas there are some in the USA, they are the rare exception. I tell people over here their rural areas remind me of America 50-60 years ago. And frankly, this is a compliment.

Ivesti is one of those villages. I was guest in a lovely home with a young son who spoke very passable English so I had a good companion. Friday night I spoke in one church and Sabbath morning and evening in another. After the evening meeting, a group of five Gypsies came to me and invited me to speak at their church the next morning. You see, four of them were Pentacostals and they apparently enjoyed my talk. I have heard the gold is missing from Ft. Knox but I think I found some of it. I have never seen a whole mouth full of golden teeth. It is quite startling and I had to concentrate on looking them in the eye, not the eye teeth.

About Gypsies, they have two types over here...at least. One person told me there are Gypsies with houses and Gypsies with horse-drawn caravans. Someone else told me there are Gypsies who wear broad-rimmed black hats, and others who do not wear hats. Then there are Gypsies who live in opulent extravagance and some live in unspeakable squalor. I have seen the squalor but never the opulence. This trip I did.

I spent hours preparing a message for a Pentecostal, Sunday-keeping Gypsy church; no easy task. Early Sunday morning I was told they had forgotten the church was having the Lord’s supper that day and so my services were not needed. But that afternoon my host took me to the Gypsy side of own.

Three houses, one each for two brothers and one for dad.

I have been in some nice houses in America and other parts of the world, some even veritable mansions, but nothing could have prepared me for this. The road was not paved but rather paved with well-packed gravel. And on each side, from behind intricately constructed wrought-iron fences, loomed Bel Airesque edifices giving mute testimony that not all Gypsies are raggedy vagabonds looking for mischief. To add to the surprise, I was welcomed as a valued guest. After all, how many Americans wander down this street in Ivesti with a look of dumb wonder all over the face. Then I was invited into one of the homes, then another and then another. With this post I have included a few pictures. The first is a street scene, the second of an unfinished home, the third of a front yard of three homes belonging to two brothers and their father. Then there are some indoor pictures. While talking to a gathering of the Gypsies on the street, I was introduced to the king of the Gypsies. A very influential man indeed.

The furnishing in the homes, and the one brother who was showing us through his home, would rattle off the cost and origin of the furnishings. A dining room suite, hand crafted in Italy, 25,000 Euro. A bed and night stand, 8,000 Euro. The base of the night stand was gold. Of course not solid, but plated. The marble pillars, the intricate curtains, the exquisite inlaid tile flooring; it was all overwhelming.

Ivesti was great but viewing those mansions made me wonder just how much more wonderful the mansions in heaven will be, and God has one for every person who accepts the payment price for those mansions and our souls; the blood of His Son, Jesus Christ. God grant that we all might be there soon.

Dateline: Podis, Romania; November 1, 2013--What a month October was. On the 1st we had just completed a Phase 3 school in Japan. On the 6th we held a cooking school in Harajuku, Tokyo, and then had a lecture for over 100 people at a special elementary school in another part of Tokyo. On the 8th I flew from Narita to Cincinnati. The time difference is 11 hours and I am normally wasted for a few days following such a transition. But not only did I have to transition from night to day, I had to transition from summer into winter. Traveling as I do can present many interesting challenges. Returning to Alabama would have been hazardous to my health as I had driven in July from Uchee Pines to Andrews University then returned to the Cincinnati area where I left my car and flew on to Japan. Driving many hours totally jet-lagged is not a great idea.

From Cincinnati I drove a few days later to Maryland where I prepared to fly on to Romania. While in Maryland I had to do a total overhaul of my suitcases. Japan is always a sauna when I arrive in August and is still just bearable by the time I leave in October. Across the pond in Romania it can be quite cool in October and in many parts they had always had snowfall in October. So, winter coat, gloves, heavy socks, warm pullovers. And a leather jacket.

I have been looking for a good leather jacket for some time. Normally I check eBay and while in Japan I saw the very one I wanted so “clicked” the Buy It Now button. It was then I noticed the only payment method was PayPal and I no longer use that service. This seller only accepted PayPal so I was in trouble. Finally, after a lot of correspondence between the seller, eBay and me, it was resolved. I may be down as a deadbeat bidder with ebay but what can I do? So, while in northern Kentucky I decided to drive up to Cincinnati to what had been a favorite Goodwill store. Since my last visit the store had moved to a much more commodious and accessible location. Entering the store, right in front of my eyes was a was a spiral suit rack with nothing hanging there but leather jackets. Kid in a candy store! The first one I examined was a Wilsons Leather that fit me like a glove, looked brand new and was the perfect style. And the price was only $37. Sold! To me. But there was another jacket, this one being 3/4 length which is great for wearing over a suit. It was $47. The one drawback with this one was it didn’t take genius to ascertain why the previous owner probably gave it up; he didn’t. His survivors gave all of his tobacco smoke saturated clothing to Goodwill after he died of lung cancer. We are talking here about stinking so bad I asked them to place the article in its own plastic bag. We are talking so strong a pipe stem would smell like wild azaleas in the springtime by comparison.

Getting it home, I Fabrized it, covered it with baking soda, wiped it down with vinegar, hung it out to air and now have it confined to a sealed plastic bag with an odor candle in the bottom. We’ll see what three months in solitary confinement will do for its interpersonal relationships.

Soon it was time to fly on to Bucharest. It was a good flight, albeit a bit rambling. Baltimore to Atlanta to Paris to Bucharest. But the travel is part of the mystique of the overall trip. It is when I have some of the most unique experiences. In and of itself the flight was not particularly noteworthy. Once in Bucharest, that changed slightly. 

A friend had intimated that he might meet me at the airport and take me to my first destination, Podis which is near Bacau, so I hung around the airport a while not wanting to miss this possible ride. When my friend did not materialize, plan B was put into action. Arriving too late to catch a 3:15 train to Bacau, I now focused on the 5:45 train. But Bucharesti Nord, the train station, is downtown so a taxi had to be acquired. You can be taken on two types of rides in taxis; one to your destination, one deep into your pockets. Once in Moscow, having flown into one airport and needing to fly out of a different one, my only option was a taxi. Turned out the taxi fare was more between the two airports in Moscow than the flight had been from Perm, near the Ural Mountains, to Moscow. So what would this one cost me?

You can order a taxi in the Bucharest airport merely by pushing a button so I did and went outside to await my surprise. Within minutes a cab pulled up to the curb and a Romanian cabbie hopped out. Before allowing him to load my luggage, I asked how much the fare would be from the airport to the train station. Taxi drivers have to be at least vaguely familiar with English because most people know some of our common phrases. Turns out this man knew English rather well and told me the fare wold be around 30 lei. That’s pretty good, the exchange rate being approximately 3 lei to one dollar. So we loaded up and began the approximately half hour ride to the trains.

The cabbie had visited Oregon. I am amazed at how many people from Eastern Europe settle on the West Coast when they immigrate to the States. But he spoke well and at the end of the trip, charged me the 30 lei as promised. It is always great to meet honest people when traveling. I asked him if I could pay him extra to help me with the ticket purchase, but he had to drop me and run as a policeman was walking toward his cab, so I was left with wrestling my three pieces of luggage into the station. 

“Why so much luggage,” you might ask. When I come over here, or really go anywhere, I ask ahead of time, “Can I bring you anything?” Since I was planning on working in two Romanian locations, one Bulgarian location, visiting one special Moldavian location, and visiting friends in Croatia, I was loaded. Practically one whole suitcase was filled with requested items. I look more like an upscale Gypsy when I travel.

As I was trying to wrestle my bags up an incline, a helpful Romanian bărbaţi came to my rescue, taking possession of two of my bags without my solicitation or permission. But I knew I needed help so followed him into the station, ready to drop my one bag and chase him down if need be. You just never know. He helped me acquire the proper ticket for thankfully I had it all written down. Then he found the right track at which to await the train. Then came the reason for his helpfulness.

“That will be $70, thank you,” he said with a perfectly straight face. And that was dollars, not lei. Seventy lei would have been too much for 10 minutes work, but $70 was totally out of the question. I pulled out a handful of crisp one dollar bills. He changed his demand to a mix of euros and lei. We went round and round until, tired of the drama, I gave him $20. He was a help and who knows, he might really need the money.

It was a long wait for the train but the afternoon was pleasant and I was, in a real sense, going home. I have so many dear friends over here who really love me and anticipate my arrival. Trouble is, for this night, they had no idea when I would be arriving. Somehow I needed to call them.

The train arrived and I found my compartment. There are six seats in these compartments and five became occupied. People like to chat away over here and got right into it as we pulled away from Bucharesti Nord. One turn to me and reeled off a lovely and completely unintelligible query of some sort. Now, I can say “I don’t speak Russian” in Russian, “I don’t understand in Russian and Ukrainian,” but so far Romanian has eluded me. So I normally put on my “I comprehend every thing you just said” face and say, in perfect English, “I have no idea what you just said but I appreciate being a part of this discussion.” At that point I become invisible.

But I needed to make a call to Podis. It is hard for me to ask favors, even from people I know. But the prospect of waiting till after midnight to be picked up was not appealing to me, so, using arm and hand signals, I asked if the woman sitting across from me could make a call to Podis. I wrote my name, destination station and arrival time and phone number to Podis down and handed it to her. She made the call, arranged for the pickup and all was well. Then I made the faux pas. I offered her five euro. She drew back in shock. The old man at the end just shook his head slightly and gave me the “you poor foreigner” look. But when we arrived at the station, the whole compartment helped me shuffle my menagerie of thrift store luggage to the station platform. We parted in good humor.

[I have been woefully neglectful with my posts and for this I am sorry. I write this on December 9 from a place called Hagota in the Carpathian mountains of the Transylvania region of Romania. The snows have come, winter is here, and I am enjoying myself, albeit missing much some of my closest friends back at Podis. But between Podis and here, I have traveled to Moldova, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia and Hungary. Have God, Will Travel.

On the road to Japan

Dateline: Tansho, Japan; October 7, 2013--This post is a bit late given that I have been on the road since the end of July. I suppose I can attempt to excuse my dilatoriness owing to the fact that my August and September schedules are about the same year after year and I am therefore not as excited about sharing what is happening. But along the way, there are some special moments and I want to share some of those. But first, some background.

On May 21 of this year, I was speeding on my Gravity mountain bike back to my office from visiting a guest at our lifestyle center. The route takes me down a gravel road with a blind turn at the bottom. I always begin the decent with a fair amount of caution, but let gravity propel my Gravity the last part of the hill. Then I take the right turn wide left, fly over the small space of flat land before really pumping it up the challenging hill to my office, gravity working against my Gravity all the way. This day I had a surprise at the bottom of the hill.

I have ridden this route hundreds of the times, but that day, for the first time, I met an oncoming vehicle at the bottom. The only option was to squeeze the rear brake, which I did. I remember the bike felt as if it were falling apart. The next thing I know I am lying on my left side in the middle of the road completely enveloped in pain. I don’t know why it is, but at times like that, most of us can’t even open our eyes. Everything hurt. I heard my friend in the vehicle say, “I’m going for help,” and he drove off. I must have been a sight. I had many abrasions on my head (no, I was not wearing my helmet), which is very vascular so I was pretty bloody.

Well, I will skip all the details except to say I had the presence of mind to ask that they not call 911. Ambulance rides are very expensive and I had two excellent doctors attending me in the road. So they scooped me onto a board, loaded me in the back of a van and off we went to a hospital in Columbus, Ga. Every turn, every bump, every anything caused pain to wash over me like a restless tide. And every time they moved me from one board/gurney/table/bed to another, the pain in my groin area was worse than I had ever experienced. In the trauma unit I was told I had six broken bones; my right clavicle and five ribs. This was Tuesday evening. It took until Sabbath afternoon for them to finally discover I had multiple fine fractures of the pelvis, thus the labor pains every time they moved me.

I was discharged one week later. During that time I had two head wounds become infected, also one on my shoulder and one on my elbow the same way. The needle entry point for my IV was also infected and I had begun to develop a bed sore. All that for $25,000. 

Now, why tell you all of this? On the night of August 26,27, I at last climbed Fuji-san, or Mt. Fuji. To me this is a miracle of God. I could barely walk in June, used a cane in July, and was still walking a bit gingerly in August while at Andrews University. But I was able to at last climb that iconic mountain.

You read it right, “on the night of….” They say it is best to climb at night so you can catch the sunrise at 12,200 feet. Catching the last bus to Station 5 with two friends from Australia (7800 feet), we began the climb at 22:45 in pouring rain. Our goal was station 10 by sunrise. At each station there is a guest house with beds at $50 each, and it is just a platform and nothing else. As we climbed higher and higher the rain came down heavier and heavier and the wind blew harder and harder and the temperature fell lower and lower. It was absolutely miserable. Very few people were climbing that night, unless you count the ones coming down, and there were many of them. The trail up what appears from a distance to be a graceful, smooth incline, is a treacherous, ankle challenging, rock strewn moonscape which doubles as a stream bed when such a monsoon hits. My friends disappeared into a guest house at level seven but three things drove me on. One, I have failed at many things in my life, but I was not going to fail this night. Success has to begin somewhere. Two, I had no excuse but discomfort to stop, and discomfort I can handle. And three, $50! For a pallet in nothing more than a barracks? Not this guy. So on I pushed.

My Aunt Winnie had given me a gossamer raincoat a couple years ago, the disposable kind you buy for some wet attraction. I bought one in China to explore the Great Wall. I was so thankful to have this raincoat although the wind was trying to tear it from my body, which it almost did near the top. But what could be, was soaked, and still I climbed higher. Then I realized it was no longer raining, although the gale had not slacked a bit. I looked up and there were the stars. It was wonderful. 

Around 3 AM I looked back down the mountain and from far below came a writhing body of lights, slowly snaking its way up Fuji-san’s tortured back. The cabins were disgorging their rested and warm denizens, each trying to summit before the sun lit the eastern blackness. I arrived at the summit at 4 AM not being able to remember being that cold for a long, long time. My body’s attempt to generate heat had me shaking to the point of convulsing. The Japanese know how to dress for such occasions and all seemed fairly oblivious to the freezing temperature.

As soon as the sun rose, I turned my steps downward, which was  almost as hard as the climbing up had been. Believe me, this is not a nice comfortable trail. But it was Fuji-san… at last. And one of the great things about climbing Fuji-san is you don’t have to do it again.

Now, as great as the climb was, that has not been the highlight of this trip. This has been a great year. Our classes for the most part have been large and some of the changes people have made is amazing. One woman went home and took her TV to a second hand store and threw out all of the sugary foods. A woman was advanced breast cancer had a cessation of pain and discharge and a tumor begin to shrink. And many people are studying the Bible which is a rare thing here in Japan. In our Phase One class we had 15 members, a large class, and every one bought an anatomy and physiology book which means they will be a part of Phase Two next summer. The course is a three phase program.

But now I am packed. In the morning I make my way to Narita, the airport near Tokyo, to begin my return flight to the USA. But I will merely be skipping through America on my way to Eastern Europe. There are some new schools opening and my services are requested. So Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova, Serbia, Croatia and perhaps Montenegro will soon feel my tread. They say it is snowing already in Romania. Thankfully I do have good cold weather clothing at my sister’s home in Kentucky. It will be there I will repack, replenish, recover and resume my journey. More about that later. Blessings.